I’m really into competitive communities, particularly when there are live events to travel to with more than just ego on the line. While it’s yet to be seen if this game will take off competitively, I’ve been contemplating how exactly it would work if it did…

In most games Team A fights Team B and whoever wins gets the money, simple enough. That obviously wont work here because everyone would play Monsters, why split money with people when you don’t have to? Due to the 4v1 nature of the game they’re going to have to break from the norm with regard to how tournaments are run.

The only logical thing I’ve been able to come up with is all teams are made up of 5 people, 4 hunters and a Monster. Team A’s hunters fight Team B’s monster while Team B’s hunters fight team A’s monster, that would be 1 round. How you determine victor when, say, both teams hunters win is where things may get complicated, but I’m sure there will be suitable secondary and tertiary win conditions.

I’m not really seeing much of a logical approach beyond this without having a flood of monster players in it for the money. Any community thoughts / dev input on this?

If they do end up rolling with the 5 player teams method I have a feeling they’ll take a different route than that, if you read the dev posts here on these forum they seem to be encouraging this tense tug of war type of game play. They talk a lot about the calm between the high action moments. They want players to have repeated skirmishes throughout a fight. With how easy it is to have a “draw” with this method whatever the secondary condition is it needs to be thought out very carefully because it will have a tremendous impact on how the competitive players approach a match. If speed becomes the deciding factor their will be a lot less of those back and forth moments that they seem to be striving for.

If they roll with the 5 player team concept, I imagine matches would run very similar to the way tennis matches go.

My thought is that each team would get an opportunity to kill the other team’s monster player. At the end of that “game”, whichever team killed the monster the fastest gets the point. :Best 2 out of 3 games. The only issue with this is that matches could potentially take FOREVER to complete.

Really,itll come down what secondary and tertiary objectives are there and how they impact the results of matches. (For example: Is there another way for the hunters to win besides killing the monster? Etc.).

I think it could be teams of 4. From the IGN video, there were at least 3 rounds, so maybe you can have 1 person on your team play the monster for each round?

And I think it could be determined by who wins the most rounds out of 4 rounds. If both teams tie for that, then it could be determined by the fastest total time to kill the monster within those 4 rounds

i think you groups of 5 would work and for tie breakers you could have a point system that does not include time (that would change the way people would play to much i think) so say the monster on team 1 got 3 strikes on the hunters before dieing would be 3 points or visa verse for every bar of health the hunters take from the monster would be another 1 point as well as some harder goals such as putting a hunter on the drop ship would be 2 points (would not count if laz rez them) or a monster gets a stealth kill would be 2-3 points that way you don’t go by who was fastest it would be more on skill to brake a tie.

7 games gives 3-4 players on the team a shot at the monster at least once

up to the team who to put on monster

one team might keep 1 person as a monster the whole run, some teams might switch it up.

I think the 1 person as a monster thing doesnt hurt the game on the competetive scene, I think it actually makes the game much more interesting. There might be teams that have that 1 strong monster player, other teams might have multiple players that are good with their specific monster.

So essentially the real players playing the games are characters too, the commentators might say “I wonder what player that team blue will chose for this matchup” “team blue picks daigo, daigo has a mean ass kraken, good choice”

It actually reminds me of the movie pacific rim. How the mechs were only as good as their pilot. Well in this game the player is the pilot and the monster is the mech sort of speak.

Edit: maybe games can start with a coin toss, so whatever team wins can choose who they start on first.

I would assume for lower parts of the brackets it is a best out of 3 and upper brackets, semi finals and up, out of 7, with a coin flip on who decides What they want first. To make it fair I would give the team that lost the flip the option to choose their hunters or monster second, giving them the opportunity to counter pick which would be a big advantage, so even if their monster is their weak end, or their hunters are, they have a fair chance with counterpicks.

In the E3 tournament, they ran 5 person teams. When one team’s hunters were playing, their monster player was acting as advisor. When both teams won one round, the team with the fastest win time got to choose if they wanted hunters or monster, and the third round determined the winner. That system sounds perfectly functional to me. Fair for both sides.

You’re part of a team. Regardless of if you run 4 man teams, with one player playing the monster and a hunter, or 5 mans with a dedicated monster, you’re still relying on at least 3 other players to play the other hunters. You just have to find a team you can trust and hope they do well.

Yes if you are a hunter you have to work as a team. But why should a monster have to work with a team? You’re doing a disservice to a great concept of Evolve making a player rely on other people for a tournament when in the game, they never rely on another player.

Then you can’t have a tournament based on the game as a whole. You can’t compare the two sides properly, and any wins or losses could be chalked up to balance issues. You can have tournaments for best monster, or best hunter team, but you just can’t have a “best player(s) of the game” tournament.

You are right about that. The game is too complicated for a basic tournament. I don’t mind having a best monster and best hunter team. The final between the best monster and best hunter would be almost meaningless. But I feel you’d have to have that game be played.

Yeah, for the sake of the viewers, having the Best Hunter squad and Best Monster would be a necessity, but, at that skill level, it’s really the game balance that settles that match. This is certainly a hard game to do a tournament for, but I’m sure that the ESports community will find a way to make it work well.